The deniers are wrong about climate change — it is happening and it’s happening more quickly and with more pwerfully than our political will can stand.
But the deniers — and big business — have enough traction on this to keep things stalled.
So we need a more effective argument to make sure we move ahead with efforts to control carbon emmission — such as this one offered by Robert Frank in his column in the Business section of Sunday’s issue of The New York Times:
WE don’t know how much hotter the planet will become by 2100. But the fact that we face “only” a 10 percent chance of a catastrophic 12-degree climb surely does not argue for inaction. It calls for immediate, decisive steps.
Most people would pay a substantial share of their wealth — much more, certainly, than the modest cost of a carbon tax — to avoid having someone pull the trigger on a gun pointed at their head with one bullet and nine empty chambers. Yet that’s the kind of risk that some people think we should take.
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Hank Kalet 
In the 70's, it was global cooling. Now, it's global warming. The answer is always the same: More gooferment control. Argh! We must be sheeple to believe this stuff!
In the 70s there was NOT a consensus that the earth was cooling. That's a myth promulgated by the right wing, the fossil fuel companies and the know nothings. It was just one or two scientists and a few nonscientific press articles. There was no consensus by an overwhelming majority of the world's scientists that the earth was cooling but an overwhelming massive majority of the world's scientists do say that the earth is warming and that there is climate change caused by all the crap that all the factories are vomiting into the atmosphere, soil and water every minute of every day of every month of every year for years and years, non stop.There was no consensus about global cooling but there is a definite consensus about global warming.\”The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Climate Consensus\”, by Thomas Peterson of the National Climate Data Center (Asheville NC), William Connolly of the British Antarctic Survey, National Environmental Research Council (Cambridge UK), and a journalist, John Fleck from the Albuquerque Journal:There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then.\” The article content begins with a discussion of a presentation before the American Academy for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in 1972 by Reid Bryson, one of the pioneers of climate research, urging that resources be used to study possible anthropogenic impacts upon the climate system. The first dim outlines of what would become known as \”climate change\” and \”global warming\” were beginning to be discerned:We'd just found out about rising levels of CO2 from Mauna Loa and Antarctica observations that started in 1957 The first simple climate models were indicating that increasing CO2 levels would result in warming Newly constructed temperature time series temperature were indicating a cooling that started in the 1940s Scientists were looking at aerosols as a possible cause of this cooling.When the myth of the 1970s global cooling scare arises in contemporary discussion over climate change, it is most often in the form of citations not to the scientific literature, but to news media coverage. That is where U.S. Senator James Inhofe turned for much of the evidence to support his argument in a U.S. Senate floor speech in 2003 (Inhofe 2003). In fact, Inhofe in the same speech uses a partial quote found in a the Washington Post op-ed page (Schlesinger 2003) to make a point that was pretty much the opposite what was intended in a report from the National Science Board. Here's the actual truth:In a 2003 Washington Post op-ed piece, former Energy Secretary James Schlesinger quoted a 1972 National Science Board report as saying, \”Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end … leading into the next glacial age\” (Schlesinger 2003). The quote repeatedly appeared other places in the political debate over climate change, including the floor of the U.S. Senate where Inhofe (2003) followed up that quote by stating, \”That was the same timeframe that the global-warming alarmists are concerned about global warming.\” But what did the report say? Note from the quote above, which I've put in bold, what wasn't included, and MY emphasis in italics:Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end, to be followed by a long period of considerably colder temperatures leading to the next glacial age some 20,000 years from now. However, it is possible, or even likely, that human interference has already altered the environment so much that the climatic pattern of the near future will follow a different path. (National Science Board 1972).
By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY, 2-22-2008:The supposed \”global cooling\” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can't make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.The '70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age. But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.The study reports, \”There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age.\”A review of the literature suggests that, to the contrary, greenhouse warming even then dominated scientists' thinking about the most important forces shaping Earth's climate on human time scales.\”\”I was surprised that global warming was so dominant in the peer-reviewed literature of the time,\” says Peterson, who was also a contributor to the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report.Scientific reports in the past decade, most notably the U.N. panel's Nobel Prize-winning efforts, have warned that human activities are warming the planet by increasing the release of heat-trapping \”greenhouse\” gases into the atmosphere.[ ] However, as Peterson notes in the paper, \”even cursory review of the news media coverage of the issue reveals that, just as there was no consensus at the time among scientists, so was there also no consensus among journalists.\”[ ]But Robert Henson, a writer at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and author of The Rough Guide to Climate Change, says: \”This is an important part of science history, and Peterson and his co-authors have done a great job of excavating it.\”People have long claimed that scientists in the 1970s were convinced a new ice age was imminent. But in fact, many researchers at the time were already more concerned about the long-term risks of global warming.\” Along with Peterson, the study was also authored written by William Connolly of the British Antarctic Survey and John Fleck of The Albuquerque Journal. The research will be published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.